So you think of something that needs doing in the kitchen, but you're in the living room. So you go into the kitchen to do it and forget what it was. You go back to the living room and remember, then go back to the kitchen and forget all over? Is that how it works?

More like, say I have finished washing the dishes and realize there was something specific I had planned to do. And I remember that it involved the knife drawer. I look at (not in) the drawer and remember that my plan was to get the scissors out of there so I could then go wrap the birthday gift. I may or may not have walked into another room after finishing the dishes.

And then there are the times such as when we had a refrigerator downstairs in the laundry room. I started downstairs with the thought that I'd put the clothes in the dryer then get a loaf of bread out of the freezer and bring it back upstairs to start thawing. Yep--back upstairs, bread still downstairs in the freezer--which was an arm's length from the dryer.

LukeJavan8
Carpal Tunnel
Registered: 06/23/08
Posts: 8541
Loc: Land of the Flat Water

Total recall, the ability of someone to remember every word they read or hear, has often been lauded as tantamount to a high level of intelligence. The opposite is more often the case. Those with total recall often have difficulty making decisions, and more readily miss understanding the overall point of a book or lecture - because they get enmeshed in an undistinguishable mass of irrelevant details. Forgetting, it turns out, has enormous value for concise understanding and for emotional health:

"Solomon Shereshevsky could recite entire speeches, word for word, after hearing them once. In minutes, he memorized complex math formulas, passages in foreign languages and tables consisting of 50 numbers or nonsense syllables. The traces of these sequences were so durably etched in his brain that he could reproduce them years later, according to Russian psychologist Alexander R. Luria, who wrote about the man he called, simply, 'S' in The Mind of a Mnemonist.

"But the weight of all the memories, piled up and overlapping in his brain, created crippling confusion. S could not fathom the meaning of a story, because the words got in the way. 'No,' [S] would say. 'This is too much. Each word calls up images; they collide with one another, and the result is chaos. I can't make anything out of this.' When S was asked to make decisions, as chair of a union group, he could not parse the situation as a whole, tripped up as he was on irrelevant details. He made a living performing feats of recollection.

"Yet he desperately wanted to forget. In one futile attempt, he wrote down items he wanted purged from his mind and burned the paper. Although S's efforts to rein in his memory were unusually vigilant, we all need - and often struggle - to forget. "Human memory is pretty good," says cognitive neuro-scientist Benjamin J. Levy of Stanford Univer- sity. "The problem with our memories is not that nothing comes to mind-but that irrelevant stuff comes to mind."

"The act of forgetting crafts and hones data in the brain as if carving a statue from a block of marble. It enables us to make sense of the world by clearing a path to the thoughts that are truly valuable. It also aids emotional recovery. 'You want to forget embarrassing things,' says cognitive neuroscientist Zara Bergstrom of the University of Cambridge. 'Or if you argue with your partner, you want to move on.' In recent years researchers have amassed evidence for our ability to willfully forget. They have sketched out a neural circuit underlying this skill analogous to the one that inhibits impulsive actions.

"The emerging data provide the first scientific support for Sigmund Freud's controversial theory of repression, by which unwanted memories are shoved into the subconscious. The new evidence suggests that the ability to repress is quite useful. Those who cannot do this well tend to let thoughts stick in their mind. They ruminate, which can pave a path to depression. Weak restraints on memory may similarly impede the emotional recovery of trauma victims. Lacking brakes on mental intrusions, individuals with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are also more likely to be among the forgetless (to coin a term). In short, memory - and forgetting - can shape your personality."

...the ability to repress is quite useful. Those who cannot do this well tend to let thoughts stick in their mind. They ruminate, which can pave a path to depression. And/or OCD. I knew someone with this; it took the form of obsession far more than compulsion.

Attention really does affect how well you remember something--or don't. I confess that I tend not to remember things if I think I'm not going to need that information again. I had a really high GPA in college because most of the tests consisted of having to spit back out a ton of force-fed facts; but within a few weeks I'd forget most of them.

I have tried to do better with peoples' names lately. Used to be, if I met someone more or less in passing--"Jackie, this is my cousin Cecelia Jones; she's visiting from Arizona"--I wouldn't remember the name by the time I left the party.

And to bring you even further up to date, it ain't a chalkboard he's using (I've not seen one of those in the past ten years - worse luck!) it's a 'whiteboard', which is a plastic-ish surface that will take dry marker pens, the markings of which rub off the board with a duster. Much the same as a chalk board, really, except they cost twice as much, the markers cost five times more than chalk*, and last for one tenth of the time. This is PROGRESS! Stand in it'sway at your peril.

(Also, you throw a marker pen at a recalcitrant student - and you find you're before the beak on an assault charge!)

[/rant]

edit* By which I mean, 1 marker pen costs five times as much as A PACKET of chalk and lasts one tenth of the time of ONE PIECE of chalk!

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